


Vices & Virtues, Pete & Tom

by tartie



Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Bed-Wetting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Repressed, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Falling In Love, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Maverick and Iceman are both college students, Sleeping Together, Surprise Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29703843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartie/pseuds/tartie
Summary: As far as roommates went, Tomreallydidn't care for Pete Mitchell.An 'if Mav and Ice had met years earlier, during their freshman year of college' fic. Because there isn't nearly enough Top Gun fanfiction out there.
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Vices & Virtues, Pete & Tom

Tom Kazansky _really_ didn’t care for Pete Mitchell. As far as roommates went, he would have preferred just about anyone else. 

For one, he was messy. Despite Tom clearly having delineated which side of the room was his and which was Pete's on the first day of move-in, Pete's books and papers and clothes and chip bags and old toothpaste tubes somehow always gravitated to _his_ side of the room, spilling over into his work space. He'd tried politely bringing it up to Pete, but Pete clearly wasn't all that interested in cleaning up after himself. Tom wondered if he'd ever even been told to clean up after himself before in his life. Unlike Tom, who intentionally chose the least-busy time and day to do his laundry, Pete waited until his had practically piled up to the ceiling to lug over to the laundry room. And to be quite honest, their small room was starting to stink. 

He was also arrogant. He walked around like he owned the place and seemed to have a new girl over every other day but (thankfully) they never seemed to get to the point of messing around. His 'luck' with the ladies only went so far, apparently. He still thought he was hot shit, one rejection didn't seem to really phase him and he would move right on with talking up the girls in the dorm building next to theirs. 

Tom was kept up at night because he could never seem to fall asleep with all the noise Pete would make. He had a tennis ball he would bounce off the wall, over and over again. When he didn't do that, he would whistle. Tom had tried covering his head with a pillow, even purchasing headphones, but that only went so far. When he did finally end up drifting off, he couldn't sleep well either because of the snoring. Pete snored like a broken motorboat, and woke up at the crack of dawn to boot, making as much noise as possible as he got ready for the day, carelessly slamming his closet doors and drawers. Tom was surprised some nights he even got any sleep at all.

Indeed, there was very little that Tom liked about Pete Mitchell. Pete had made it known he didn't care much for Tom, either, even going so far as to call him a "control freak". It wasn't like he went out of his way to lecture Pete on not leaving toothpaste all over their sink, or brush his crumbs off the floor. They were lucky enough to have an in-room bathroom sink rather than have to share with the hall, and he would prefer it to be clean when he went to wash his face in the morning and he was sick of the feeling of crunching on something whenever he got up to cross the room. Tom had also heard him whisper once right outside the door to a girl, not to worry about him being uncomfortable with having her over because girls didn't like him because he was "too cold". Well, Tom couldn't care less what girls thought about him. He was there for one thing, and that was to graduate in four years. He could care less about messing around with girls, and it wasn't like Pete's opinion of him mattered a bit. 

In the meantime, he went out of his way to avoid Pete (which could be difficult seeing as they were both in many of the same classes), spending time with his friend Ron. Pete had his own best friend, Nick Bradshaw, who happened to be a few years older than him and was a junior. He couldn't wait for when he was able to have his own room, though. Being stuck with Pete Mitchell was a major bummer. 

~  
One night, just when Tom was entering into the first stage of his REM cycle, he was violently jarred out from under the covers by a shrill shout. Assuming someone had broken into their room, he leapt out of bed, reaching for the baseball bat he kept as a keepsake from his High School Little League days he'd carefully placed under the bed. Quickly realizing it was Pete that had screamed, he slowly sat it back down as his eyes adjusted to the dark.

Pete's face was bright red, his chest heaving, sheets pooled around him tightly. 

Tom took a breath, rubbing his eyes with his fist. 

"Are you - " 

"I'm sorry -"

Embarrassed was an odd look for the mostly uber-confident Pete Mitchell. 

Tom climbed back into bed as Pete caught his breath and nothing more was said. When Pete woke up at 5 in the morning to strip his bed of his clearly damp sheets to take to the laundry room, Tom pretended to be fast asleep. 

Something seemed to change after that. Pete no longer had girls over all the time. He spoke a little less, seemed a little more distant. Not that he ever bothered to say much to Tom in the first place, at least not directly.

"My dad died." His voice was quiet, quieter than Tom had ever heard it. Tom had his head buried in his physics textbook, prepping for the upcoming midterm exam. 

He glanced up, eyes locking on Pete's green. "What?"

"My nightmare the other night that woke you up. My dad, he died in Vietnam. It was really long ago though. For some reason, I get these dreams about it every so often. Like I'm imagining his plane shot down or something." He shook his head to the side swiftly, as if it was stuck in his head and he needed to shake it out. 

"Oh, I'm..." For once in his life, Tom wasn't quite sure what to say. 

"Don't be. I guess I just needed to tell someone. It helps, in a way."

~  
"So, are you going anywhere for Thanksgiving break?" Tom glanced over at Pete one evening in mid-November. 

Pete shrugged one shoulder. "I think I'll probably stay here, you know. I hear they'll be serving roast turkey and pumpkin pie. Plus I'll get practically the whole library all to myself to lounge about in. Won't be that bad."

"Don't you have any family to go home to?"

"Nah, not really. At least, none that really wants me." He glanced at his sneakers. 

"You're not even going back with Brad's family?" He asked. 

"I did last year. This year they're travelling up to New York to see all the relatives and I don't think I was invited."

Tom twirled his pen, thinking. He couldn't believe he was saying it, but the words fumbled out of his mouth before he could think. "Well, my mom's picking me up next Friday. We've got a guest room, I'm sure she wouldn't mind if I brought you along with me. Last year she made so much food, we had leftover turkey and stuffing into February."

Sure enough, Pete ended up going home with him the following week. His irritating, messy, loud, obnoxious roommate he had been counting down the days till he could be rid of, went home with him for Thanksgiving. And it didn't feel awkward or weird in the slightest.  
~  
The remainder of the semester had gone by slowly but swiftly. Tom wasn't sure if he was irritated or apathetic to the fact that Pete (who he barely ever saw studying or doing anything productive) had managed to get the same grades he had and made the Dean's List. That second semester, he noticed Pete looking at him a little differently, though. At first, he barely noticed it at all. But out of the corner of his eye, he started seeing Pete glancing over at him ever so often, as if he was trying to intentionally avoid looking at him but couldn't quite help himself, like he had an extra arm or leg. 

"What are you staring at?" He snapped one evening, not really meaning to snap so harshly but unable to help himself as he sat at his desk trying to decipher his professor's scrawled handwriting across his Calculus homework that he hadn't done so well on. 

"Huh? I'm...not." Pete had just a hint of blush forming across his face. "You have Professor Singh, right?" He hopped down from his perch on the bed. "Let me see what you did wrong."

"Sure, like you're some kind of expert," Tom rolled his eyes. 

"I help my friends out with their homework. Here, just let me see." He swiped the paper out of Tom's hands, and Tom felt a strange shiver run up his arm has he felt Pete's hand brush his ever so slightly.

"Aha, see where you messed up. Right here," he pointed at a spot on the paper. 

Pete ended up surprisingly adept at the subject and was able to quickly explain what he did wrong. _Well, at least you know you're better than him in Chemistry,_ he thought. 

He could still feel those eyes burning into him after that, and he couldn't help but glance over at Pete every so often as well. He no longer felt that passionate dislike of the other boy that he had in the first few months of the semester. He'd become comfortable with the mess, with falling asleep to the thud of his tennis ball, with being woken by Pete banging his dresser drawer open or accidentally dropping something, as he so often did. With Pete's footfalls, his breathing, the way he tapped his fingers on his desk when he was deep in thought. 

~  
"Mhhhh."

It took Tom a while to make out what the whimpering, moaning noise was. It was Pete in the midst of a nightmare. He hadn't had one since all those months ago, and Tom had been super awkward about it and unsure of how to help. But they knew each other a lot better now. He was lurching and rolling side-to-side like a kitten he had once fostered that desperately wanted out of its box. Slowly, Tom tiptoed over to the other boy's bed, lightly shaking his shoulder. 

"Hey, Pete," he whispered. "Pete." He repeated his name a little louder, continuing to shake his shoulder. Pete's bright green eyes popped open as he looked up at Tom. 

"Hey, I think you were, uh, having a nightmare," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "Was it your dad again?"

Pete nodded. Without warning, Pete grabbed the back of his head, pulling his face closer. "Thanks, Tom," he whispered, and suddenly, Tom could feel Pete's lips on his. It was a soft, barely-there kiss. Pete smelled like sweat and the orange he'd seen him eating earlier that night. 

Just as Tom was about to open his mouth a little wider to let him in, Pete pulled back, the look on his face like he had just made the mistake of missing a vital ingredient in a dish that took hours to prepare and was going to have to start from complete scratch. 

He didn't see Pete after that. He had got up, made some excuse that he had something to do and didn't go back to his room that night. Or the next night. He saw him in class, but he was too late to get to speak to him before class and as soon as it was over he was the first one out the room and by the time that Tom had gotten up in the mad rush of students, he was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, he decided to track him down to Nick Bradshaw's dorm room. As an upperclassman, Nick was lucky enough to have the room to himself. 

"Hey, I was just wondering if you've seen Pete. I needed to ask him about something," he said as Nick opened the door. 

"He was here earlier but I haven't seen him recently." He shrugged. 

Sighing, Tom headed back to his room, deciding that he was okay with just letting Pete come to him. 

To his surprise, Pete was right there, sitting at his desk reading a physics textbook. 

"There you are! I just went to Nick's looking for you. Where have you been the past few days?"

"Relax, mother. I didn't realize I had to inform you of my location 24/7," Pete rolled his eyes, turning back to his textbook. 

"I never said I was your mother. God Pete, you _kissed_ me, then you run out of the room and just expect everything to go right back to the way it was before? Seriously? You're that nonchalant about it?"

"I kissed you? Huh, I don't even remember. I must have been really tired. What do you want me to say? Want to have some kind of heart-to-heart about it? I didn't take you as that kind of guy."

"No, I just expected something more than being brushed aside while you run off somewhere." 

"Look, I'm not...into guys. I don't like you. It wasn't anything. It wasn't anything, and I don't want to talk about it any more," Pete spat out, snapping his book closed as he grabbed his towel. "I'm going to go take a shower." 

He watched Pete leave the room and sighed, pulling off his shirt and preparing to pull down his bed covers. He felt exhausted all of a sudden.

"I didn't mean to. Honestly, it just happened," Pete whispered into the blackness of the room.

Tom turned over in his bed. "I know. You know, I didn't mind it." 

"Sure you did."

"Really, it's fine. You're not a bad kisser." 

"I hate sleeping. It's so stupid. We waste so much of our lives asleep. Just think of how much more we can do, how much more time we would have, how much more meaningful our lives would be, if we could invent a way to permanently make it so that humans didn't need to sleep." Pete thumped his tennis ball. 

Tom felt the breath he didn't realize he was holding slowly release. They were okay again. 

~  
The next time Pete had the nightmare, Tom ended up in his bed. He wasn't sure how, but he woke up half in, half out of the bed, his arm flung around Pete haphazardly. The twin bed was far too small for two people to fit, especially one as tall and gangly as Tom. He wasn't exactly the most comfortable. He could feel a crick in his neck forming and he was pretty sure his left foot had fallen asleep. Yet, it felt right. He felt whole having Pete in his presence. Touching him, feeling his warm body. Slowly, he disentangled himself from him, relieved he was still fast asleep. 

From that moment on, he found himself climbing into bed whenever Pete had a nightmare, and sometimes just because. Neither of them complained or mentioned it the next morning. 

Eventually, their freshman year began to draw to a close. 

"I was thinking...next year. I haven't chosen a roommate for next year yet," Tom began, wiping the eraser crumbs from his desk. 

"I assumed you were going to room with Ron. Or your other friends, Matt and Dave?"

"Well," he shrugged. "I can, I guess. I just thought, since we were already roommates all it might be easier to just put you down, unless you don't want to. Which is fine with me if you want to move off campus," he cleared his throat, not quite looking Pete in the eye. 

"No, I mean, that would be fine with me. How soon does the paperwork have to be in?"

"Not for another week for so. I just thought I'd ask." 

"Well, feel free to put me down as your preference. Now if you don't mind, I hear the volleyball court calling my name. I promised some people from geography that we could do a game."

"Did you say volleyball? Hey, count me in. Wait up," he called as Tom was about to step outside of the room. 

"I didn't realize you play."

"Oh, I play alright. I'm going to cream your ass!"

"We'll see about that, Tom. We will see."


End file.
